Follow by Email

Wednesday, February 6, 2019

Criminal Union

Investigators,

I couldn't watch much of the speech last night, just up to the point of glorifying all the poor farm-boys who died on the beaches at Normandy. It was clear that the unifying theme was going to be the goodness of Americans at war, and that 75 years was the necessary reach back into the past, necessary to pull that off.

This was a speech of conciliation between the Republicans and Democrats. This was the common ground, upon which they could agree, and they did.

The agreement is that the empire goes on bleeding the rest of the world, and that drug prices will come down.

Reduce the costs of health care and price of prescription drugs.Immigration that is safe lawful and secureAnd pursue a foreign policy that puts Americans first.

​The biggest problem which I see all of us facing is the same problem which was identified in The Limits To Growth, in 1972.

In 1972, Nixon had gotten off the gold standard, and US oil production had already peaked (as predicted in the 1950s). That book presented the best possible systemic analysis of the trajectories of all the aspects of global economy and population going forward. Systems Analysis was the new science, which programmed multiple variables, which all affected each other in certain ways, into the biggest mainframe computer of the day at MIT. The first model, tested against the history of the 20th century was Word-1. The second model, somewhat refined, was World-2, and that created the projections that showed the peak of industrial economy around 2014-2015. The limits to growth were resource depletion, environmental degradation, and the increasing inefficiencies of larger and larger layered complex economic systems.​

This analysis seemed intuitively obvious through the rest of the 1970s, and Jimmy Carter's efforts to get Americans to conserve fuel typified the rational acceptance of it.

After Carter, we got Reagan/Bush decrying the analysis as false, and claiming that there was no limit to the growth of American prosperity.

That went over well, much better, but I think Dick Cheney and other henchmen of the elites still understood the validity of the analysis. They merely abandoned the majority of society in their plans going forward with "Continuity of Government" preparations. They have prepared a separate world for the elites in their well supplied bunkers, but it seems sterile, like a zoo. Zoo life is already a huge part of what makes us sick critters. The elite approach so far has been to goose the fuel-burning economy as much as possible, promise a rosy future, and to secretly prepare their own nests, by robbing the cookie jar. We can't know the full extent of it, and there is increasing discord in the ranks of our rulers. It's going to be hard to implement, and might stray as far from projections as the invasion of Iraq did.

We are not included in any of that, anyway, and we can reasonably expect our world to have much less fuel, much less electricity, much less information and supply chain problems with groceries and utilities.

Painting this as being necessitated by war is the traditional approach to accomplish vast societal change. The problem with that approach this time is that war sucks out every bit of available resource rapidly. The side that can burn more fuel faster usually wins. There is nothing left to pay the victors this time. The risks of major-power war are just too high, and the benefits are hard to imagine at all.

Global warming is a noble threat, but it is exactly not the kind of threat that humans are biologically wired to mobilize for. It creeps over generations.

Human societies have collapsed before, when the combination of maximal use and bad weather destroyed their systems of food and fuel provision. It's part of our cycle.

We have never had this much benefit of fossil fuel wizardry ever. We can't imagine living without it. Each of us has the equivalent of 50 to 60 "energy slaves", fossil fuel equivalent slaves. That is invisible to us. All of the products and materials we use have lots of fossil fuel energy embedded. How do we get shovels?

The question is whether we human members of industrialized society can reset our ways in a couple of generations to use vastly less coal, oil and iron ore, maybe 80% less, maybe 90% less.

We will need a completely different approach, if we can do it at all. We will need to become loving stewards of life on earth. In the short term, whoever burns more fuel wins. How can we possible make a transition to stewardship, when anybody burning more fuel can kill us and take whatever we have made?

It is a koan. We will have to solve the koan to survive, and not just a few of us. It is a test we have to pass as a species.

That seems very unlikely, but I would rather die in the attempt than die in a bunker with big screen TV.

Unless we get WW-3, this will be long and hard. I want to die without regrets. How about you?

​The "Black Block" agents provocateur are being used by ruling elites to justify increased violence against the yellow vests. This is very clear to the yellow vests, but not clear to the mass media at all. The Black Block come in and attack small businesses and small-owner property and pro-yellow-vest reporters. The police shoot yellow vests "in response to the violence". Thanks Eleni.

A lot of the Strategic culture stories are shut down today, including one looking at the relationships of global elites to the yellow vests and Venezuelan socialism, both populist waves, which seek to redirect resources into the hands of working people. I also can't get access to their story about the false charges of "Russian collusion" against America's only anti-war candidate, US Army Reserve Major Tulsi Gabbard.

Trump Says U.S. Will Leave But Pentagon Keeps Adding ForcesThe U.S. retreat from northeast Syria is still not happening. In yesterdays interview with CBS President Trump again said the troops would leave, but the the Pentagon is doing the opposite of retreating.

Pepe Escobar says that America has missed the Eurasian train, but he does not seem to be aware of the impact of suddenly declining energy resources, which lies just ahead. Dominance under current and recent past conditions is different from what it will take to do better in coming years, which will be resilience and depth of fallback positions. (To my analysis, Russia is poised to do best, having already collapsed, rebuilt, having lots of natural resources, and in a position to benefit from global warming. He focuses on Chinese ascendancy.)

The Earth's "third pole" is the massive glacier field of the Himalayas and Karakoram. It stabilizes global temperature and the flow of water through the great rivers of Asia, which supply the agriculture which directly feeds hundreds of millions of people. The very best case scenario is that they lose 1/3 of that ice mass and the rivers get more unreliable. The worst case is 2/3 ice loss and mass starvation. Sea level is bound to rise.

At least a third of the huge ice fields in Asia’s towering mountain chain are doomed to melt due to climate change, according to a landmark report, with serious consequences for almost 2 billion people.